In this excerpt from a #TalkingTech Live broadcast, the panelists weigh in on Uber's bad week, and what's next in ride hailing. LOS ANGELES -- This week's tech news was dominated by charges of sexual harassment and discrimination at ride-hailing service Uber, a potential push from Google to bring ride-sharing to the mass market and a move from Facebook to bring more ads to the social network. But Uber owned the most headlines, which started on Sunday with a blog from a former female engineer who described how the company's human resources department repeatedly deflected her and other women's reports of sexual harassment from their colleagues, even telling her that she could expect a negative performance review if she stayed on her alleged harasser's team. The blog post was seen as a wake-up call for Silicon Valley, where six out of 10 women say they've experienced unwanted sexual advances, according to a survey released last year. Still, many pointed out that the male-dominated tech industry has had several such "wake-up calls" -- to little avail.

BRATISLAVA (Reuters) – The European Commission wants to reduce national restrictions on where some types of commercial and health data can be stored, Vice-President Andrus Ansip said on Thursday. BRUSSELS (Reuters) – U.S. software company Salesforce called on EU regulators on Thursday to investigate antitrust issues related to Microsoft's 26 billion bid for social network LinkedIn. SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A bill signed into law on Thursday by California Governor Jerry Brown allows a self-driving vehicle with no operator inside to test on a public road, a key step enabling a private business park outside San Francisco to test driverless shuttles. NEW YORK (Reuters) – Unocoin, a Bangalore-based bitcoin startup, has raised 1.5 million in funding from a mix of Indian and U.S. investors, the company announced on Thursday. Silicon Valley is diving into artificial intelligence (AI)and machine learning research, an industry estimated to zoom to 70 billion by 2020 from just 8.2 billion in 2013, according to a Bank of America report that cited IDC research.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The image was startling, but a look into what could be tech's immediate future. After being ostracized by the tech industry for most of the election year, there sat venture capitalist Peter Thiel, beaming, to the left of President-elect Donald Trump at the Trump Tower Tech summit in mid-December. Silicon Valley's billionaire leaders had disavowed Trump during the campaign, throwing their weight behind rival Hillary Clinton. Only Thiel stumped for the real-estate mogul, and after the tech industry had turned on him for that and his role in Gawker's failure, he was luxuriating in the I-told-you-so moment. Tech tries to get Trump's ear after shunning him during campaign Trump tells tech leaders'There's nobody like you in the world' The display of power portends a roiling year or two in tech.

The year 2016 was supposed to be when the tech bubble finally burst. Instead the world blew up. Amid Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the increasingly catastrophic consequences of climate change, the dominance of a handful of technology companies over society became increasingly obvious – from Facebook's troubling impact on democracy to Elon Musk's plan to colonize a new planet before we destroy this one. Still, if there's one thing we can learn from this year in technology, it's that no matter how bad things get, someone in Silicon Valley will make money off it. The social network continued its relentless campaign to swallow the internet whole, racking up almost $6bn in profit in the first three quarters of the year and soaring to 1.79 billion monthly active users.

The future depends on connectivity. From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars to telemedicine and mixed reality to as yet undreamt technologies, all the things we hope will make our lives easier, safer, and healthier will require high-speed, always-on internet connections. The FCC regulates who can use which ranges, or bands, of frequencies to prevent users from interfering with each other's signals. Low-Band Frequencies Bands below 1 GHz traditionally used by broadcast radio and television as well as mobile networks; they easily cover large distances and travel through walls, but those are now so crowded that carriers are turning to the higher range of the spectrum. Mid-Band Spectrum The range of the wireless spectrum from 1 GHz to 6 GHz, used by Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, mobile networks, and many other applications.